Determinants of Bureaucratic Support for Democracy in Developing Countries

• In Event: Political Attitudes of Bureaucrats and Regime Transitions

Abstract

Much of the literature on the cultural determinants of democratisation focuses on the attitudes of citizens towards democracy. It widely shares the view that democracy is not sustainable without citizen support for democracy. By contrast, we still know little about the attitudes of bureaucrats, i.e. government employees who are appointed rather than elected, towards democracy. The tension between democracy and bureaucracy has been a prominent theme in political science and public administration ever since the writings of Woodrow Wilson and Max Weber at the turn of the 19th century. Given the sheer size of modern bureaucracies and the power of unelected bureaucrats in the process of making and delivering government policies, it may be argued that bureaucrats’ support for democracy is even more critical for the survival of democracy. This is especially true for new democracies that lack resilient institutions and an entrenched commitment of citizens and political elites towards democracy.

Yet ever since Wynia’s original study of ‘federal bureaucrats’ attitudes towards a democratic ideology’ in the United States back in 1974 there has been no attention to this line of inquiry. Against this background, this paper seeks to identify the determinants of bureaucratic attitudes towards democracy. It distinguishes three types of determinants:
(i) Demographic determinants such as gender, age, education, religion, which are well known to matter from studies of citizen support for democracy.
(ii) Bureaucratic career determinants such as the institutional affiliation of bureaucrats, their rank, and their years of government service, which were shown to matter in Wynia’s original study of bureaucratic attitudes towards democracy.
(iii) Organisational determinants specific to the management of public bureaucracies, such as politicization, nepotism and meritocracy

The paper draws on survey data from two developing countries in South Asia: Nepal and Bangladesh. They have undergone diverging democratic trajectories since the beginning of the 2010s. According to the Varieties of Democracies Liberal Democracy Index, Nepal belongs to the small group of countries in the world that has significantly improved the quality of its liberal democracy, while Bangladesh is among the countries that has undergone the largest degree of democratic backsliding. The survey was conducted in 2017 as in-person survey of 1,500 central government bureaucrats in Nepal and 1,100 bureaucrats in Bangladesh. The survey data provides a unique opportunity to assess the determinants of bureaucratic attitudes towards democracy in a developing country context.

Authors

• Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling, University of Nottingham

• Christian Schuster, University College London

• Kim Sass Mikkelsen, Department of Political Science and Government, Aarhus University